The embodiments disclosed herein relates to energy harvesting and dynamic power reduction in circuits that operate in switch mode, transitioning between on and off states, and circuits that possess analog high speed slew rates. Specifically, the disclosed embodiments operate on the principle of harvesting energy flux fields from moving electronic charges that are the result of charging or discharge currents, capturing the above said flux fields, reprocessing them for the purpose of dynamic power reduction of impulses or signals that originally produced the moving electronic charges, and/or utilizing them in charging an external storage device.
Dynamic power reduction is a primary goal of most electronic designs. Efforts made to achieve power reduction range from methodologies that reduce the minimum feature size of electronic manufacturing processes, thus minimizing the parasitic capacitances in process devices, enabling circuit supply voltages to be reduced; to strategically and actively enabling and disabling certain sections of circuits (burst mode processing), during circuit operation to reduce unneeded power dissipation. These methods can be quite expensive to implement, in that, to accomplish this implementation, one must redesign circuits, requiring expensive changes to existing architectures.
An alternative approach is to attempt to capture RF, heat, or other energies emitted by the moving electronic charges in circuit designs, converting these radiated energies into useful power that can ease the current draw from system sources. Many methodologies and circuits presently exist to achieve the above, but these existing methodologies and circuits do not tap into the circuit root causes of dynamic power dissipation. Radiated energy harvesting methodologies and circuits rely on capturing relatively low magnitude, medium to far field radiated energies from circuits and structures, thus relegating the above mentioned methods low in efficiency and low actual energy harvesting capability, thus limited usefulness.
The disclosed embodiments tap the root cause of dynamic power dissipation. Certain disclosed embodiments capture and harvest these radiated and close proximity integrated circuit electronic flux fields that are created by moving electronic charge or current, allowing captured electro-magnetic and electro-static flux to generate currents that are fed back into the system, thus reducing the power drawn from power sources used to supply power to electronic circuits, and/or utilized to charges external devices.